Frank H. Wu, Chancellor and Dean, William B. Lockhart Professor of Law

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Frank H. Wu, Chancellor & Dean of UC Hastings, is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, which was immediately reprinted in its hardcover edition, and co-author of Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment, which received a major grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. He is writing a book on the Vincent Chin case, and his op-ed discussing the significance of the subject appeared in The New York Times on the thirtieth anniversary of the crime. Other op-eds of his have appeared in the Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, National Law Journal, and Chronicle of Higher Education.

Over the years, he has maintained an extensive schedule of media appearances and public speaking. His professional credits include commentary for National Public Radio and Now with Bill Moyers. He has appeared as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show, O’Reilly Factor, and C-SPAN Booknotes with Brian Lamb.

Prior to coming to UC Hastings, Chancellor Wu was a member of the faculty at Howard University, the nation’s leading historically black college/university, for a decade. He also served as Dean of Wayne State University Law School in his hometown of Detroit, and he has been a visiting professor at George Washington University, University of Maryland, University of Michigan; an adjunct professor at Columbia University; and a teaching fellow at Stanford University. He taught at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in its inaugural year.

He is dedicated to civic engagement and volunteer service. He was appointed by the federal Department of Education to its National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), which advises the administration on higher education accreditation, and by the Defense Department to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, which submitted to Congress the report From Representation to Inclusion. He currently is a Trustee of Deep Springs College, a highly-selective full-scholarship all-male school enrolling twenty-six on a student-run cattle ranch near Death Valley, where he previously taught for several short periods. (The Trustees voted in 2011 in favor of transitioning to co-ed.) He was a Trustee of Gallaudet University, the only university in the world dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing persons from 2000 to 2010, and Vice-Chair of the Board for the final four years of his tenure; he participated in the presidential selection process. He served on the Board of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund from 2004 to 2010. Chancellor Wu is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

Prior to his academic career, he held a clerkship with the late U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti in Cleveland and practiced law with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco – while there, he devoted a quarter of his time to pro bono work on behalf of indigent clients.

University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco is redefining legal education through our experiential, interdisciplinary, and international approach to the law. We integrate rigorous academics with hands-on practice, preparing our graduates to tackle the legal challenges—and leverage the opportunities—of the 21st century.